B-Fish samples many genres to create new album

Sitting in his living room on a recent Thursday evening, Kevin Kilfeather gives voice to what sounds like a contradiction, the kind of existentialist mind-bender that might spill out of a stoned philosophy major like water from a toppled bong.

“We’re all over the place, and we’re at one place at the same time,” notes the Jack and the B-Fish frontman, flanked by his bandmates.

Kilfeather’s comments may initially read like a product of cognitive dissonance, but hear him out —and then do the same with this band.

The point Kilfeather’s making is that for all the different sounds that percolate in a given Jack and the B-Fish tune — the band liberally samples elements of ska, funk, hard rock, jam band grooves and more — the goal is to fuse them into a cohesive, easy-to-digest whole that belies their many individual parts.

On the band’s excellent new record, “Premarital Sax,” they’ve done just that.

“Sax” is a big step forward from the group’s granite-dense 18-song debut, “Retro Radio,” a massive swarm of ideas. Listening to it in a single sitting akin to trying to decipher a foreign language with no formal training in said tongue.

On “Sax,” they streamline things a bit.

“That’s the main complaint that we’ve ever gotten at our shows or from people listening to our music: ‘It’s really busy, it’s hard for me to focus,’” says Kilfeather, a shaggy, laid-back dude, just like everyone else in the band. “We’ve learned to feel ourselves out in the music, as opposed to before, where it was kind of like, ‘Let’s all just turn up and jam.’ We’ve learned dynamics and transitioning. We’ve learned to flow with each other more.”

Saxophonist-keyboardist Steven Archer adds, “I think we’ve grown to be more assertive as a band. We know what we want, and we’ve kind of matured in a way where we’re not so against the grain.”

Nevertheless, true to B-Fish form, “Sax” is still a fantastically diffuse record, with a ska-inflected, tongue-in-cheek blues shuffle about carnivorous marine life (“Sharks”), organ-fired sing-alongs (“Eat It”) and concussive rockers (“Desperate Song”), to name but a few, adding to the album’s distinct energy.

“Where do we go from here?” Kilfeather asks in song amid the saxophone skronk of album-opener “Cosmic Rodeo Express,” and it’s clear the question is a rhetorical one: this bunch can go just about anywhere.

Perhaps this is why Jack and the B-Fish frequently get likened to a certain pioneering musical mind who warned of the perils of eating yellow snow.

“I listen to maybe a little too much Frank Zappa,” Kilfeather admits, as if such a thing was possible. “That’s where I got a lot of influences, because it has no box. We play songs that are jams one minute, we play songs that are funky the next minute. With this band, it’s endless.”